I NEVER PLANNED TO DELIVER A BABY ON MY SHIFT 🚑👶 BUT THEN I HEARD THE SCREAMING
It was supposed to be a routine call. Just a minor rear-end in the grocery store parking lot. I was already thinking about dinner, going back and forth between the taco place on Fifth or the leftover pasta sitting in my locker.
Then I heard it.
A scream. Not the kind people make when they’re arguing over whose fault the dent was. This was different – sharp, panicked, raw. The kind that grabs you somewhere in your chest and doesn’t let go.
We jogged over to the silver minivan. The side door was hanging wide open. Inside was a young woman, maybe her mid-twenties. She was soaked through with sweat, breathing in short hard bursts like she’d just run flat out across the whole lot. Her hands were white-knuckling the door handle, eyes huge. There was a towel balled up under her, a half-open bag of baby stuff on the floor. And a guy standing outside pacing circles with his phone, looking like he had absolutely no idea what planet he was on.
“She’s crowning!” he said. “Oh my god, she’s crowning!”
My stomach dropped straight through the asphalt. I looked at her. Then at my partner Donna. She just looked right back at me like, Yeah, that’s you.
I dropped.
What They Don’t Tell You in Training
Knees on the asphalt. Gloves on. Go.
That’s the thing about field work. You can run the simulation a hundred times. You can pass the written exam, ace the practical, get signed off by some instructor who smells like coffee and hand sanitizer. But there is no simulation for the moment you’re crouched in a grocery store parking lot on a Tuesday, staring at a baby who has decided today is the day, and the fluorescent lights from the Kroger sign are flickering above you, and somewhere behind you a shopping cart is rolling slowly across the lot because nobody grabbed it.
Her name was Renee. I found that out later. In the moment she was just the woman in the minivan, and she was looking at me like I was the only solid thing in the world, which was terrifying because I had delivered exactly two babies in my career and both of them were in controlled environments with a full team and equipment and a doctor on the line telling me what to do.
This was a Kroger parking lot.
Her husband, whose name turned out to be Dale, was still on the phone. He’d called 911 first, then his mother, and was now apparently trying to call back 911 because he’d hung up on them by accident. He was wearing a University of Tennessee t-shirt and had the specific look of a man whose brain had simply stopped processing new information.
“Dale,” I said. “I need you to put the phone down and come hold her hand.”
He looked at me. “Should I film it?”
“No, Dale.”
Donna was already pulling the kit. She’s been doing this eleven years. She moves like everything is calm because she’s decided it’s calm, and sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps a scene from going sideways. She set up behind me without a word, handed me what I needed before I asked for it, talked to Renee in this low steady voice that wasn’t quite a murmur and wasn’t quite normal conversation. Just steady. Like weather.
Renee
She’d been having contractions since that morning. She told me this between breaths, in pieces.
Thought they were Braxton Hicks. Went to the store anyway because they needed diapers for her older kid, a two-year-old named Marcus who was, I kid you not, sitting in the cart seat at the front of the minivan watching a cartoon on a tablet with headphones on, completely unbothered. I glanced at him once. He didn’t even look up.
The contractions got worse in the cereal aisle. She made it back to the car. Then the other car hit them in the lot, just a tap, barely anything, but Renee was already in a bad way and the jolt of it scared Dale so bad he’d screamed louder than she did.
That’s when we heard it.
She was thirty-eight weeks. Not early, not late. Her OB was across town. The hospital was twelve minutes away. And this baby was not waiting twelve minutes.
“I need to push,” she said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered through her teeth.
“Then push,” I said.
The Part That Gets Me Every Time
I’ve told this story maybe thirty times since it happened. Friends, coworkers, my mom on the phone, the guy at the taco place on Fifth who recognized me from the news clip Dale posted online without asking anyone’s permission. And every time I get to this part, I still don’t quite have the right words for it.
There’s a moment in a delivery where everything gets very quiet inside your head. Not calm, exactly. Quiet. All the noise drops out. You’re not thinking about dinner or your aching knees or the fact that there’s motor oil on the asphalt two inches from where you’re kneeling. You’re just there. Completely there. Like the present tense got very small and very specific and everything outside of it stopped existing.
Renee pushed twice.
And then there was a baby.
A girl. She came out loud, which is the best possible thing. None of that awful silence where you hold your breath and wait. She announced herself immediately, like she had a complaint to file about the whole situation, which honestly, fair enough. I wrapped her in the clean towel from the bag on the floor, did what needed doing, talked Renee through the rest of it while Donna monitored and Dale made a sound I cannot describe except to say it was not a word in any language.
He sat down on the asphalt next to the car.
Just sat down. Cross-legged. Put his face in his hands.
“Dale,” Renee said.
He looked up. Eyes wet.
“Come here,” she said.
And he climbed into that minivan and she put the baby on his chest and he held her with both hands like she was made of something that could dissolve, and I backed up and gave them ten seconds of whatever that moment was, because some things you don’t crowd.
The Audience We Didn’t Ask For
By the time the backup unit arrived, we had a situation.
Somewhere in the previous eight minutes, a small crowd had gathered at a respectful but very interested distance. Maybe fifteen people. A woman in a sun hat was crying. Two teenage boys were filming on their phones. An older man in a Carhartt jacket was standing with his arms crossed nodding slowly, like he was watching something get built correctly.
The Kroger manager came out at some point. He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he propped open the automatic door and stood there, which accomplished nothing but felt supportive.
Donna loaded Renee and the baby for transport. Standard stuff. Both doing well. Baby pink, loud, already making her preferences known. Renee was exhausted and shaky and kept saying thank you in a way that made me want to look at the ground.
Dale rode in the rig. He’d stopped trying to call people and was just staring at his daughter with this expression I don’t have a word for. Not wonder, exactly. More like he’d been handed information he didn’t have the capacity to store yet and was just going to have to carry it around until it made sense.
Marcus, the two-year-old, watched the whole loading process with mild interest and then went back to his cartoon.
After
We cleared the scene around 6:40 PM. The taco place was closed by the time I got off shift. I ate the leftover pasta standing up over the locker room sink, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds.
Donna sat down on the bench and said, “Good job today.”
That’s it. That’s all she said. Donna’s not a big talker. She’s been doing this since before I got my license. She’s seen more than I’ll probably ever see. When she says good job, she means it and she’s done with the conversation.
I said thanks.
She changed her shoes and left.
I stood there for a while with the pasta going cold in my hand, thinking about Renee’s face when she heard the baby cry. The way her whole body just unlocked. Like she’d been holding something enormous and she finally got to put it down.
I’ve been on calls that end badly. Plenty of them. The ones where you do everything right and it still doesn’t work, and you drive back in silence and nobody says anything because there’s nothing to say. This job hands you both kinds, and you don’t always get to pick which shift you’re on.
That Tuesday in the Kroger lot, we got the good kind.
Dale did post the video. He blurred our faces, to his credit, but you can still see my knees on the asphalt and Donna’s hands moving and hear Renee making sounds no human being should have to make in a parking lot. It got a lot of views. My mom texted me a screenshot with three heart emojis and then called to tell me she’d shown it to her whole book club.
The baby’s name is June.
I know because Dale sent a message to the station two weeks later with a photo. June Marie, seven pounds four ounces, doing great. Renee doing great. Marcus still watching cartoons, apparently unimpressed by the whole thing.
I put the photo on the inside of my locker door.
Right next to the taco place menu, which I finally got around to trying the following Thursday. The carne asada was good. Not life-changing. But after the week I’d had, good was more than enough.
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If this made you smile even a little, pass it on. June deserves the attention.
For more wild rides and unexpected turns, check out how I Met My Husband at 44. The Day After His Funeral, His Kids Handed Me a Folder., or prepare to be baffled by what happened when I Zoomed In on Grandpa’s Old BBQ Photo and Now None of Us Can Explain What We Saw. And if you’re in the mood for something truly thought-provoking, you’ll want to read about why My Old Teacher Stopped Me in the Hardware Store and I Haven’t Stopped Thinking About It Since.
